Tag Archives: nudity

Well, the shows were really good and everyone was very happy. But we got home very late and everyone is very tired. I also hadn’t eaten, so, when dinner ain’t over until ten, there ain’t no games.

Sigh.

One of the many reasons I am grateful for this blog is that, when Mrs. McP asks what I did during my day, I can say “Played video games….but it was for the blog!” and she vaguely accepts that.

Feminina:

Yeah! That’s the value of the blog! It transforms playing games, which we’d do anyway, from something that is purely for entertainment purposes and therefore vaguely frivolous and easily skipped, to an intellectual activity that contributes to personal fulfillment and stuff. Work that angle.

I played. Man, I’d left a bunch of stuff undone in Korinth. Wandered around checking out question marks and trying to complete the location objectives they turned out to be. It was not a great night for me, strategy and stealth-wise, so I’d try to sneak in to rob someplace, instantly get spotted, wind up thrashing around in a messy melee, run off into the the city to escape the gathering guards, circle back to try to finish robbing the place while they were looking for me somewhere else, etc. I mean, I got stuff done, but there was no ELEGANCE to it.

Ah well. I haven’t followed up on the main story, so we’re still in about the same place other than the number of question marks on the map. Also, I’m in Korinth.

Butch:

Oh I work that angle. I also find it funny that Mrs. McP, the love of my life, the woman who stood in front of all of those we love and made wedding vows, the woman that bore me three children, seems far more interested in your enjoyment of your hobby than my enjoyment of my hobby. It’s often:

Her: “What did you do today?”Me: “Couple chores. Played some games.”Her: ****glare****Me: “C’mon, I haven’t played in a while, I don’t have much to write about and Femmy’s getting edgy.”Her: “Oh, right! Femmy! Go ahead then.”

And she means it! I can tell when she’s being snarky! My soul is crushed, yeah, whatever, why didn’t you get the dry cleaning. But god forbid YOUR soul gets crushed!

But whatever. I’ll work any angle I can. It’s how one stays happily married.

I hear ya on the nights where sometimes you just don’t have it. This game seems prone to those nights. It’s funny, because I kinda feel that stealth heavy games often are more prone to “I just didn’t have it” nights. Maybe it’s because of that mechanic where if you just make the one simple mistake of getting seen early it all goes to shit, which increases the impact of being prone to mistakes on a given night.

She probably just doesn’t want you to look bad in front of the internet, represented by the blog/me. She’s afraid you’ll be mocked endlessly for not keeping up if you don’t play once in a while. All our legions of fans will start howling and complaining and before you know it it’s front page news that half of PFTL is falling down on the job.

No one wants that. Just keep working that angle.

Butch:

Oh I am WORKING it. I can’t bring dishonor to the family pen name!

Yes! Yes, Mrs. McP! I AM PLAYING GAMES FOR THE CHILDREN!!!!!

Dear God I’m tired.

I’m going to play some games. FOR HONOR!

After I shower.

Feminina:

Do it! For honor and family and the future!

Butch:

OK!

So, what. Did an “impact” quest that, gotta say, not seeing the impact. I brought a flower from some doom and gloom dude to a doctor. That’s it. You do that? Wonder what the impact was. There wasn’t a choice or anything except not to do it.

Then met Socrates, which I’m gonna spell this way, mostly cuz I can’t see it without hearing Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted call him So Crates. Did I mess that up? Cuz I got seen, and the dude was all “There is evidence of tampering….” It wouldn’t have changed it, right? No way. Socrates is gonna be in this either way.

The I went and found the sculptor and lied my way in saying I was his lover. He’s at a dock. I’m standing on a temple now in the port place.

I think I see what happened, here, as it is about to happen to me. You did this, figured “Well, as I am now outside the city…..MAGPIE!” Right? And off you went, letting Perikles marinate a while.

Right?

Feminina:

You lied your way in to see the sculptor! That’s awesome! I didn’t even realize you could do that!

I just climbed the wall around the corner, inched around, and dropped in behind the guard, then knocked him out. I refrained from assassinating someone, man. It was an Impact decision, even if I’m not sure what the impact was.

And delivering a flower to a doctor. Hm. Doesn’t ring a bell. I might not have found that yet.

But yes: I got the sculptor out of Athens, thought “hey, I’m out of Athens!” and went…elsewhere. You know me well.

As for Socrates, yeah. I also was spotted while attempting to stealthily switch the votes. But he MUST have been going to do whatever he was going to do in the game anyway, right? Only thing is maybe his friend got exiled instead of being able to stay in the city. My bad, friend.

Although, also, my bad tampering with the will of the voters, so perhaps I just didn’t want to subvert democracy!

Anyway, hey, there are lots of nice places to go in Greece that aren’t Athens. Like Korinth! Very handsome statue of naked Poseidon there.

All other issues aside, I think this game has given me more MALE NUDITY, albeit in statue form, than anything I’ve ever played. I have to salute it for that.

Butch:

You know you’re getting desperate when a naked statue does it for you.

T SHIRT!!!!!

Yeah, man! I was all “It’s been so long since we’ve……SEEN each other….” and the guard was all “Well….he’s going to die anyway….better make it count.” and in I went.

Poor guy. Poor, gullible guy.

It showed up after the snake guy. Weird dude all “I have seen the end of Athens….it is a flower, withering in the sun…a sickness shall befall it….” and Kassandra is all “Yeah, that only happens in stories. Like this story I heard about in this parallel universe where some bleeding heart named Femmy spared those kids in Kellpholonia….” Ok, I made that past part up. But he mentioned a sickness, and told me to take this wilted flower to a doctor who would understand. So I did. End of quest. Weird.

Sure, sure. You’ll subvert anything if there’s a question mark.

Feminina:

Hey, these statues are more than any other game sees fit to provide. I must give credit where it’s due.

And no, I definitely didn’t get an apocalyptic prophecy about a wilting flower. Although if I do, I’ll certainly deliver it, because unlike Supideo, I know better than to try to avert prophecies.

Butch:

Ah, but you did try to avert it! I figure, as an impact quest with no choice, the only choice is not to do it.

And you didn’t.

Even not doing something is a choice.

Deep. Very deep.

Feminina:

Well…I…yes…I mean, I never even saw it, so it wasn’t a CHOICE so much as a failure to notice something…but in a deeper sense, then yes, that’s a choice I made in a metaphysical way…

Very deep.

Butch:

You made your choice when you embraced the life of the magpie.

Feminina:

I embraced that life long ago in many other games, and that decision is still following me.

Karma, man.

Butch:

Athens shall perish because of your magpie.

Or not. I still can’t tell what that was all about.

I’ll tell you what IS bad karma: Fitness. I kinda let things slip there, for a while, cuz hot, busy, etc. Went to the track yesterday, and now muscles I didn’t even know I had hurt.

Feminina:

That’s definitely the thing about fitness. You can’t just get fit and be done with it! No, you have to MAINTAIN fitness, with constant effort. And if you stop for a while, you have to start practically all over again with the pain and suffering! It’s not fair!

What a great half-day Tuesday that was yesterday! The kids all behaved and left me alone and Mrs. McP came home and took all of them to this class where they learned how to identify wildflowers and weave baskets out of sea grass and so I got to play for, like 13 hours and wasn’t that naked dress ball awesome and

OH WHO AM I KIDDING!!! AIEE!!!!

I’m installing it as soon as they are on the bus.

Feminina:

I started to get suspicious when you said the kids left you alone.

I should have been suspicious as soon as you said they all behaved, but I wanted to believe it! Because you deserve a great half-day Tuesday!

But no matter. Install the game immediately and let the dead past bury its dead. But first, loot those dead, because no point letting good loot go to waste.

I did start the game! Played an hour or so. It’s good fun so far. Beautiful scenery to run around it, bushes to skulk in while you wait to assassinate people, etc. Attractive question marks in all directions that I’m sure will lure me into endless magpie runs all over the map.

I’m into it.

Butch:

I thought you’d doubt me at “great.”

We deserve a fun, scenic, summery romp of a game!

Though, as we are a game blog, as I boot this up, I will throw out an observation and a question we shall return to during this game:

RDR2 did you many wrongs, but it did grant you a small mercy: it did not put every icon of every everything on the map. Had it littered the map as so many games do, you’d still be swearing and looking for bones cuz you can’t help yourself. At the very least, you’d be all “I WANTED to do that Dutch quest but bones, cards, you know…..” and you’d be pissed.

Now, here we are, back in the fold of AC, a franchise where, about an hour or two, you can barely see the damn map cuz it’s covered in icons.

I’m gonna be curious here as to whether you are going to be happy for a return to icon aided magpie or if you’re going to say that RDR had it right. It’ll be an interesting comparison, to be sure.

Feminina:

It will be an interesting comparison. Because that is indeed one thing I said for RDR2: it didn’t lure me into collectible-hunting by giving a lot of clues on the map. And I did, indeed, somewhat appreciate that it instead made its collectible-hunting difficult enough that I could ignore it, rather than just easy enough that I felt compelled to do it, while also time-consuming enough to be annoying.

I did appreciate that. On the other hand, we must remember that I partly appreciated it because I didn’t enjoy the game that much and didn’t want any reason to play it longer than I had to. When I’m enjoying a game, I don’t mind treasure-hunting as much because I don’t mind spending extra time in its world. I mocked myself (justifiably) for obsessing over those murals or whatever they were in DAI, and certainly the animus fragments in our previous Assassin’s Creed…but I didn’t actually hate what I was doing while I was doing it.

So it’s certainly possible I’ll miss RDR2’s sparse maps. There was something kind of nice about being able to remain comfortably ignorant of what might be over the next hill. Don’t want to ride over that hill and see? You never have to know! It worked for that game. Especially, maybe, for me in that game.

But it’s not as if I actively hate Fallout’s hundreds of question marks. It’s a different style, and we can definitely discuss it, but I’m not sure it’s a style I like more or less, necessarily.

Butch:

Well, true. You enjoyed (we both enjoyed) the likes of DAI more. That said, the magpie (and the encouragement to magpie) resulted in more than just mutual mockery. It, at times, actively derailed narrative momentum. There have been many a game, good games, where we were all good blog wise, everything themey, all good, and then for, like, three or four days straight we’re all “I got nothing. Well, I have this flag, these fragments, and Miss April 1967.”

Which, yes, I get is partly my confusion as to why to litter a story heavy game with silly collectibles in the first place, but still. Encouraging people towards silly collectibles can derail narrative flow and, for all of its flaws, for all of the ways it sabotaged its own narrative flow, you can’t say that RDR2 sabotaged its narrative flow by encouraging us to go get silly collectibles.

I shall keep an eye on this.

But now, I’m gonna go install it.

Feminina:

That is very true. It did work very well in terms of narrative. Though, again, this was as much about the fact that neither of us CARED about the collectibles, as that the collectibles didn’t exist. We could easily have spent an extra 300 hours ignoring the narrative while we hunted for dinosaur bones and rock paintings and legendary fish, if we’d been so inclined.

But certainly the difference is that RDR2 kept those collectibles out of sight unless you actively cared enough to go look for them, whereas some other games (including, in the past, the AC franchise) have sprinkled icons for them all over the map, making it difficult to just ignore them. The way it was so very, very easy to ignore dinosaur bones when I had absolutely no clue where to look or what to look for. Man, that WAS pretty great.

And this did make it a lot easier for those of us were more interested in the story to just follow the story. Because magpie is a real affliction, damn it! I see question marks, I have to go check them out. Even when they are 99.9% certain to be nothing I care about. So yeah, props to RDR2 for that design choice. (Although it might have been somewhat frustrating for people who DID want to hunt everything, but didn’t necessarily want to spend the rest of their lives doing so.)

We’ve talked about this before, and maybe what we really want is a way to toggle those collectibles/sidequests/etc. icons on and off on the map. We’ve seen variations on this ability to customize maps in games before, so it’s not really a huge technological challenge. I think I remember TW3 giving me some choices about what I wanted to see on the map?

Butch:

One should be able to toggle.

EXCELLENT T SHIRT!!!!

This game is taking forever to install…..Probably those lady animations.

You are playing as a woman, yes?

Feminina:

Ha! Undoubtedly it’s all those complicated female animations slowing you down. And yes, I am playing as Kassandra, rather than Alexios, and I’ll give them credit, once you get it installed, the female character IS actually able to move! I’m so impressed with what they’ve managed to achieve.

One day we’ll stop mocking them for that.

Butch:

Kassandra. With a K. Because of kourse.

We shall never stop mocking, for we are the internet.

T SHIRT!!!

(We’ve fallen behind, T SHIRT wise.)

Ok! Played some games!

I’m already confused.

Let’s see….I, what….

Did the battle of 300 or something. Buttons were mashed. Didn’t die. Fought the next guy. He glowed sometimes. Buttons were mashed. Didn’t die. Not sure what I did. Already confused.

Met the two assassin hipsters who gave me game options I can change later. Am I supposed to know who they are?

Then got confused. Map is confusing. Eagle is confusing. HORSE is confusing.

Basically, I just got the horse and now they’ve taken the girl. Am I supposed to rush? Cuz so many question marks…..

The fuck is with the eagle?

And, as for horse, I think I already lost it. I picked one, then it was all “They have the kid!” and I said “SHIT, MAN! I’m comin’!” I got on the horse and…well…it handles a little differently than Roach did and pretty soon I was flying over cliffs into level five bandit camps and I died. I reloaded, and there were the three horses in the stables, couldn’t get one, already had the “find kid” quest, decided to walk. Probably bugged the game already.

I miss Roach.

What does the eagle do besides make things more confusing? Isn’t there just some good ol’ fashioned assassin’s sight or eagle vision or some shit?

So, on the idea of icons, did you play “guided” or “explorer?” Cuz I picked “guided,” and MAN there’s guided shit all over the place. Should I change?

(As an aside, Malaka is a pretty great swear.)

Feminina:

I lost the horse too! Went to find the girl, stopped to talk to a guy sitting by a cave, turned back around, and the horse was gone. I just walked the rest of the way, but it turns out you can whistle for your horse (I think by holding the up directional? but I might be misremembering, it could be a different directional) and it will show up, so try that. And the hint says “if your horse is badly injured he won’t come back for a while, but once he’s had a chance to rest, he’ll come when you whistle,” or something, so don’t worry about killing it.

Which horse did you pick? I picked Phobos, because he’s nimble. And also, apparently, scary.

I am still in the “pushed some buttons, not really sure what I’m doing, but didn’t die” stage myself. Just…hit some buttons. Eventually it will probably become more clear which buttons are actually useful to hit. That’s my plan. Pretty much right now I know R1 is good, that’s the basic attack, and square is dodge. I use those a lot. And the R1-L1 combo to parry, I like that. Everything else, I’ll worry about later.

I feel like the eagle will possibly become more useful later–did you get the bit where they tell you how to see through its eyes, so you can scout the territory ahead? I found that mostly just confusing, but I can imagine that it might actually be helpful if you wanted to see which side of the building had more guards on it, or whatever.

Basically, you’re doing great. I’m still a bit confused myself, but the scenery is pretty and we’ll figure it out.

As for the map, I also chose guided, which I think–in an uncanny reference back to our earlier conversation–is the choice that puts a lot of icons and question marks on your map, instead of just letting you roam around and find things or not. I guess that really wasn’t a spoiler, to mention that the game we’re playing kind of does exactly the thing we were talking about, but you hadn’t loaded it yet! I irrationally didn’t feel I could give away details!

So…I guess the main thing is, I went the lots-of-icons route, but maybe you could go the no-(or limited, perhaps)-icons route and we could compare.

Butch:

Oh. Well. Ok. I was a little worried, though, as ALL THREE horses were still there in the stable when I reloaded.

I don’t care that much. No horse will replace Roach.

I picked…uh….the one on the right. I picked the one on the right. On the right. A warrior’s horse! Or something.

I miss Roach.

I did the “Hit L1 and X to bull rush!” bit when I was SPARTA!!!! but I guess I could only do that then (or when I get the skill someday). That was handy. Until I couldn’t do it any more. Then, less handy.

Well….I got close to the vineyard, and it was all “Your target is close! Hit up to call [whatever the fuck it’s called].” So I hit up and WHAMMO! BIRD! To which I said “The fuck? I’m a bird?” And it had some controls, and I could fly and look at shit, which led to more icons, and I was confused.

Then I got a little closer and it told me to do it again, and I was all “No way, game, that was some fucked up shit,” but I did it anyway and then it told me about the “golden circle” and all that and I found the guy.

I kinda knew where he was in the first place……but hey. Bird.

Scouting territory? Yeah…that’s gonna be something. I’m not that spatial, so trying to say “Ok, so….if that’s what the bird saw….then the guard must over there…” will likely be “I think that’s what the bird saw so…no..wait…so then the guards would be over oh, no, here they are, I’m dead.” At best. It’s likely going to be “Ok…so..if that’s what the bird saw…wait, I don’t think it’s…where am I? Why….shit, I’m going the wrong way…I…hang on…welcome to Lemoyne? That’s not even in the GAME!”

Hmm. I’ll stick with this a while. I think I’m just in shock cuz we went from RDR2 to full Ubisoft. Full Ubisoft is a shock.

Though it was telling that it said that “explorer” was “how it should be experienced.” Maybe I’ll switch.

Feminina:

Oh, wait…actually I think I picked ‘Explorer’ because I remember being swayed by the implicit judgment in “the way the game should be experienced.”

“I don’t want this game to look down on me!” I thought. “Especially since I already went with ‘normal’ difficulty instead of ‘hard’!”

Do you have question marks in your ‘radar’ when you look around? Or are they already icons? Maybe that’s what it’s about. Maybe I have question marks I’m supposed to ‘explore,’ and you have icons to indicate that you already know what’s there (assuming you could remember what the icons indicate, which I know I certainly can’t).

So much for my theory that maybe this game was giving us the option of a more RDR2 experience…maybe it’s only giving us the option of a more FO4 experience.

Unless I actually did choose guided despite the game’s judgy commentary, but that really rings a bell that makes me think “oh yeah, I did what it wanted me too” not “I rebelliously went my own way!”

Butch:

Dude, thus far, I look like a question mark factory exploded in ancient Greece. There’s health icons, there’s quest info, there’s SO MUCH SHIT. But yes, they are on the radar.

I’ll fiddle with it. I did notice (as I go through EVERY OPTION before starting a game cuz of my ex) that you can pick and choose what parts of the UI are up there, and they all start “on,” so I guess you can shut up some of that on screen noise regardless of which mode you pick.

I don’t know. Whole thing is confusing.

Feminina:

SO CONFUSING.

But pretty! And we’re going to have fun sneaking around and assassinating people! And there were some roleplayish bits with conversation options that “may change the story”!

I let those two thugs who came to beat her up at the beginning go. Because I’m nice like that.

Butch:

As did I. Once again, we won’t have many notes to compare.

Except on the romance. You’ll likely end up with someone different than I will. And hey! Look at all the armored dudes! A goodly portion have to be broody! You’re in paradise!

Feminina:

Yeah, the story variations are going to be all about who gets romanced.

Oh–I would be remiss if I did not salute this game for its nod towards male nudity, however.

Game: I salute you.

Butch:

ALREADY??????

Malaka, for real?

Feminina:

Well…depends on what you mean by “for real.”

I take it you haven’t seen this nudity. It’s quite visible. You’ll get there.

Butch:

Oh dear.

I was going to let the kids watch a little of it later on. Should I….not?

Feminina:

No, you’re fine. So far the game is very family friendly. In a murdery way. The nudity is just a statue. That’s why I was being all coy about whether or not it was “for real.”

I mean, it’s really in the game!–but it’s not actually a “real” character who’s naked.

It’s a very naked statue, though. You’ll see.

You probably already have, in fact…didn’t we get a swing-by of the statue’s butt during the opening eagle-flight sequence?

Butch:

We did. That we did.

I rather liked that sequence. Cool opening.

And timely! We have a nesting pair of golden eagles nearby. They were both over the house eyeing the children the other day. Probably telling someone where the guards are. Good thing they’re so confusing.

Feminina:

“OK, the bird said the door was on the left, so…if that’s the bird’s left from the air, that means…wait, which direction were they going?”

“Let’s just go rob some other house. This one probably doesn’t even have any hidden tombs in the basement.”

Butch:

Bird: Ok, the house we want is the one with the frazzled father and the crazy assed kids.Assassin: Ok, put it on the mini map.(935874298574543 question marks later)Assassin: Shit.

Feminina:

And that’s why you live in your town! It all becomes clear. You tolerate half-day Tuesday because it throws off assassins!

Worth it.

Butch:

No. No it is not. By about 245 I’d welcome the assassins.

Notably, I have not seen the eagles on half day Tuesday. Even strong, magnificent birds of prey are all “Oh HELL no” when it comes to that.

Feminina:

OK, so it’s not worth it, but I can see how you might have imagined it would be, before you got there.

You’re eyeing the house, checking out the neighborhood, thinking “yeah, this’ll confuse assassins, sounds good, what’s a little half-day Tuesday compared to protecting my family from an ancient order of trained killers?”

It was only later, at around 2:45 on that first Tuesday, that the horrible truth dawned on you.

Butch:

More like 235……..

Christ, Tuesday.

And I’m out of smoked tequila.

Come for me eagles!

Feminina:

You have a week. You still have time to go out for some more tequila! Or to stand next to the biggest landmark you can find so even the eagles can’t confuse things.

“That thing. He’s right next to that thing.”

Of course, the assassins will probably get stuck in traffic on the way.

Busted John out of prison. Fun little mission, but not sure about themeage. Weird that Dutch wasn’t happy that they busted him out.

An interesting pattern with Dutch (and one that could be related to certain leaders of the day) is that before anything happens he says “I’ll have a plan any second now” and then when someone else does something he gets mad and says “I HAD a plan!” Dude, you did? You came up with it as I was doing something? He’s always full of shit, really. One wonders if he always was.

Well, the two times we did see him with a plan, one was pointless and vindictive (killing Bronte, which accomplished nothing but revenge and got the law down on them, the very thing he’s mad at Arthur for with John) and the other wasn’t much of a plan at all (bandannas and yippie kai aie! in broad daylight). Also reminds me of certain present events.

Anyway…..

But then….met up with the lovers again. Did you meet up with the lovers again? Got that note from Penelope, and couldn’t resist.

Went back to Braithewaite manor and, well, I guess the fact that Lady Braithewaite’s burned body is just there waiting to be looted is a good tip off she died. But strolled in and got dead. So did the sneaky next time and did the mission.

Did you do that? Cuz…..I’m not sure what to make of that. I kinda have a lot to say about that. The more I think about it, the more I have to say.

But after that, found myself way the fuck out by Riggs station, middle of nowhere, and, for some reason, dude wouldn’t sell me a train ticket. So rode to Strawberry to get a train ticket, and there’s no trains there. So rode back and THEN he sold me a ticket. Took the train to Annesburg, decided to do Downes’ mission, decided that might take a while, called it a day.

I’ll do that next.

So you do the lovers?

Feminina:

Dude, I know! “I HAD a plan! And YES I came up with it just as you were doing that, I do all my best thinking when people are taking actions I didn’t officially approve! Which is why…uh…people should not take actions so I can think…look, the point is, I was GOING to save him any day now.”

Whatever, man.

And yes, the lovers. “Ah, Boston. Good. They’ll like you up there.”

Thanks! I think. It was amusing that Penelope just straight-up robbed her family and took off. And Arthur’s reaction: “they’re not chasing us because they’re upset about the romance, they’re mad because she robbed them blind! Good for her, I guess.”

The bit I found oddly entertaining was driving the train. There was no real challenge or danger to it, you just…drive the train. And ring the bell! And blow the whistle! Made me feel kind of like I imagine Arthur might have felt: “hey, I’m driving a train, this is kind of fun! Whooooo-whooooo!” And…then you’re done and you move on. It was both completely pointless, and quite pleasant.

And then they offer you some jewels, and I turned them down and got honor, although I have no idea why it would have been dishonorable to accept them. I mean, it was payment for a job done–why is that wrong? But I was thinking “nah, these kids probably need it more than I do, considering I have $3000 in my pocket and am dying and all.” Maybe that’s the honor: thinking of someone else rather than yourself.

Butch:

And what was interesting is that people are starting to go “Whatever, man.” Indeed, the more people make other people go “whatever, man,” the more Dutch screams “DISLOYAL!”

Metaphor’s getting a little upsetting.

Good for her robbing her family at a time when Arthur is starting to doubt his own family. We’ve talked before about how the Rhodes families are kinda like the gang. We’ve seen the families and Dutch prattle on endlessly about loyalty. Here, we have Penelope being totally disloyal, and Arthur’s reaction is, as you say, “good for her.”

Hmm.

“I didn’t know you could drive a train.” “Neither did I….”

The only real stressful bit was that Roach, for some reason, insisted on following it. I couldn’t have dealt with running Roach over with a train. Too traumatic. But he was ok, so it’s all good.

I did the same thing with the jewelry. But on that, the thing I kept thinking on was the moment before you decide to take it: Arthur’s there holding the bracelet and says, half in awe, half in disbelief: “The Braithewaite treasure…” Turns out there was (some) gold there, right? And after all the fighting and scheming and bloodshed (shit, she even talks about unnecessary, stupid bloodshed on the way to the train), here he is finally holding it. And why? Because Penelope and Beau, the naive, weak dreamers stole it, not the gang. Moreover, Arthur has it not because he pulled a gun or threatened them or beat them, but because she is giving it to him freely because he helped her. He helped two people find love, and THAT’S why he’s finally holding the Braithwaite gold. I think, in the way that line was delivered (as an aside, dude who plays Arthur is really good at these subtleties), Arthur finally gets it, that maybe, just maybe, doing the right thing is what works.

I think it’s good storytelling that that moment had to happen after Arthur knows he’s gonna die. His realization that THIS was the way to the treasure, helping the lovers, comes too late. By the time it dawns that maybe killing everything that moves isn’t the best possible way, he can’t really change.

And before you go all “Hey, Butch, wait. We killed a lot of people here. It’s not maybe ‘the right thing,'” I’d say “But Femmy, the gang would not have thought ‘Hey, maybe the way to get all those hicks’ money is to help these kids.’ They’d have dismissed that, as they thought that killing everyone and burning fields and houses and everything was the only way. Compared to that, this is the right thing.'” Shit, admit it. Even we, as players, thought this was, at best, an amusing diversion. We both said “Of course there’s no gold.” Turns out we were wrong. Turns out we got the gold….at the end of the quest we thought was, at best, an amusing diversion.

Good stuff.

Feminina:

Yes, at this point, the only way to be ‘loyal’ seems to be to either sit quietly without complaint, or actively reassure Dutch how awesome he is, while he broods and speechifies and probably steers them all straight to disaster. Troubling, indeed.

And it’s true, the Braithwaite Treasure did exist after all, and as you say, the gang never came near it with their plans and playing one side against the other while getting played themselves…but Arthur, by helping out a couple of people with no real expectation of reward, gets his hands on it eventually.

And now he’s dying and can’t do much with it. It’s an interesting mechanic, as well, that Arthur CAN’T simply fund Dutch’s plans with his own earnings, or I’d think “well, maybe he should have taken it to help the gang out.” As we’ve said before, at least he could call Dutch’s bluff, if there were ever a specific amount named, but there never is–no tally of “$350 gained out of $10,000 needed to head to Tahiti” or anything. I regularly donated all the loot I picked up to the gang’s treasury (easier than going to a fence), and the book neatly shows everything I gave, but the total, once you’ve upgraded camp as much as you can, doesn’t seem to mean anything and eventually I kind of stopped caring.

“I can give and give and never get any closer to pleasing Dutch, so why bother?”

Butch:

I have no idea where they got an idea for such a character. Nope. No idea.

Right! The treasure was an unexpected irony. Arthur gets it by saying “Aww, what the hell, I like these folks,” where when Dutch tries, and underestimates everyone, not only does he fail, he gets Sean killed and uproots his gang.

And “why bother?” is, oddly, the most hopeful part of the metaphor, right? I mean, if Dutch does have a real world equivalent, right? Here’s his followers realizing there is no pleasing him, no way he’s ever getting them to “Tahiti…..”

I’m also starting to think that the mechanic you mentioned isn’t there because Dutch has no intention at all of taking anyone to Tahiti. He is, after all, the best dressed one, right? He’s a con man. Why do we believe his intentions? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he just, at some point, says “See ya later, suckers!”

In real life, demagogues often try to enrich themselves at the expense of their most ardent supporters. So I’ve heard.

Feminina:

I have also heard this! But you never know…history teaches us many things that we may be better off ignoring. He’s probably only the best-dressed (and the one with the nicest tent) because he…uh…needs that extra comfort to keep his brain working on all those brilliant plans he’s totally thinking up on a daily basis. Seems legit.

Con men only con OTHER people! Not us! Not his biggest fans!

Definitely not going to be the ruin of us all. No sir.

And I’m certainly not weeping quietly at the keyboard right now in abject terror, that’s for sure.

Butch:

Yeah, we’ve gone dark after vacation. We gotta cheer up.

I was just in Nashville!

Food! Booze! There. I feel better.

Feminina:

I have company coming! I have to clean things and set up beds!

I’m not sure if I feel BETTER, but I’m distracted.

Perhaps that’s enough, in these troubled times.

Butch:

Stop being dark, dammit!

At least you’ll have booze.

Feminina:

I will have booze!

It’s gonna be great. We’re going to love dying in the fiery wreckage of our democracy.

I mean, hacking up blood from TB. Whatever.

Ooh, ooh, I do have something less dark: we went to the circus while you were on vacation! The in-laws wanted to take us since the kids had never been, and Mr. O’ and I were both pretty unenthusiastic, but it was actually a lot of fun.

I had forgotten that it’s just kind of cool to watch human beings do weird, improbable things. No special effects except costumes and some lights, just people juggling lots of blocks, or leaping recklessly around on trampolines, or contorting into strange and unlikely positions while balancing on each others’ heads. Good old-fashioned, simple entertainment, you know? It was weirdly heartwarming, for something garishly colored that cost hundreds of dollars (which I fortunately did not personally pay).

And I kept thinking of Arthur cheering at the vaudeville shows, and you at the honky-tonk, and wanting to yell out “woooooooeee! Those guys can JUMP!” or something.

So yeah. Circus. Thumbs up.

Butch:

I, too, like circuses. There is something rather heartwarmingly, old timey about it all.

You SO should’ve cheered like that. Turn to people all “You seein’ this?”

Probably shouldn’t have said “Show us them knickers!” though.

Feminina:

“You seein’ this?!” would have been awesome.

Butch:

I do like circuses. I even like the weird French ones!

I can’t believe you missed a chance to cheer like that.

Feminina:

I have never been to the weird French circus, but would probably like it. Especially if I remembered to cheer like Arthur. Weird French circus folk LOVE that!

Butch:

They do! Especially if you shout “Dance the Can can!”

Ok, for the sake of us all, played some more.

Helped Downes’ son, helped Downes. I guess.

Not sure what to make of that. Quest was called “Do not seek absolution,” and maybe I haven’t been absolved. They just took my ninety bucks and left. I hope.

I also helped a widow learn to hunt and gave her a chance. I got jumped by Murphrees right after. She’ll probably get killed. She will, won’t she?

I don’t know what to make of Downes. I am intrigued that this all was very much a white, skippable bit.

What did you take from it?

Feminina:

I thought it was very much about Arthur trying–not to put things right, because as he himself keeps saying, there’s no way for him or anyone else to do that–but to make things a little bit better. To BE a little bit better as a person than he was when he first met these people.

He’s dying, and he realized he’s spent most of his life hurting people, and he’s trying to do something different.

Butch:

He is. That he is.

What did you make of the line “This country is man unleashed?” Someone certainly was proud of themselves for that one, but I’m not certain if it’s true. Or what it means.

And what did you make of the fact you could skip all of this?

Feminina:

It is very interesting that a lot of Arthur’s trying to be better is stuff you can skip. So…you don’t HAVE to try to be better.

Maybe your personal reaction to learning you’re dying of TB isn’t to try to be slightly better in your remaining days than you were in the ones leading up to the discovery. Maybe you figure hey, the damage is done, no point worrying about it now. Let’s skip these ‘helping people’ things and just rob stagecoaches and shoot people full time!

Your call.

As for this country being man unleashed…I dunno. This, unlike other countries, is where all the impulses of humanity (both good and bad?) are allowed free rein? I don’t know if that’s true, or if it’s just the kind of wild boasting that’s to be expected in a very young country that’s growing rapidly and (in some quarters) is full of its own imagined destiny.

Butch:

It was one of those lines that someone thought sounded really deep. It was even delivered with MUCH GRAVITAS. Slightly overdone gravitas, you ask me. Or even if you don’t ask me.

So all I have left is Micah. Is it long? Like, long long?

Feminina:

Oh, you probably have a lot more left than Micah. Have you talked to Strauss? You gotta talk to Strauss.

But if I recall correctly, this particular bit of Micah is not that long. It’s one of those ‘first step in a series’ things, and later ones will be longer, but I THINK the first one is pretty short.

Although it’s been a while, so I apologize in advance if that’s completely wrong.

Butch:

I have not talked to Strauss. He’s had a white thing in camp for ages. I figured it was more debtors, and fuck that. I ignored him in Shady Belle, too. He hasn’t had a yellow thing in forever.

This is the bit of Micah in Annesburg. The first bit of Micah in Annesburg.

Feminina:

It is more debtors, but you might want to do it anyway. It’s actually related to the theme we’ve been discussing.

Or if you’re in a hurry and want to continue to say screw it, that’s fair–I can just tell you what the story was.

I’m pretty sure the Annesburg part of Micah was fairly short, at least. I remember meeting him there and I don’t think it took up that much time.

Apparently there’s even MALE NUDITY, though! This should have been my favorite game of all time! Equal opportunity random naked people!

And somehow I missed them all.

This is the final straw, game. I’ve had it with you. RAGEQUIT FOREVER.

I mean, if I weren’t already done.

Butch:

You know, you missing the male nudity in this game, given your experience, makes perverse, perfect sense.

Feminina:

I know, it really does just put the perfect finishing touch on my entire experience of this game. Every possible thing goes wrong, repeatedly…and I missed all the male nudity.

Siiiiigh.

Butch:

I have to be close. I kinda feel I’m doing endgame stuff, wrapping up the Downes, wrapping up Penelope. When you start wrapping up the side shit that’s when you’re about to wrap up the main shit. Right?

Except you did all this long ago and you only just finished.

I’m so confused.

We, at some point, do need to discuss what we do next. I keep thinking we need to do that soon, but…….

You have AC:O in the house. I’d be willing to do that. Might be a nice, light, refreshing change.

Feminina:

I have to be honest, I’m a little confused myself about why this game didn’t wrap up a few hours before it did.

Well, good thing we were smart on Friday, cuz today’s gonna be dumb, and this is pretty much our last shot for the year. Band concert last night (they really do have a good band program in this town), so everyone went to bed late and got up early cuz we all have colds. Kids were even too tired to fight. That’s tired.

I was so tired I typed “Thursday” into the email address and your name into the subject line.

It’s gonna be that kind of day.

I wish I could do a heist then go to a naked fancy dress ball.

Is that even possible?

Ok, there’s today’s starting discussion question: Can there be a fancy dress ball and nudity at the same time?

(Help.)

Feminina:

This time of year, being smart every other post is still miles above every logical measure of achievement.

I wrapped video games yesterday. Held them in my hands.

Then I played a couple of rounds of Pokemon. It’s…not the same. There’s very little narrative in a monster-battle card game. (Or in a monster-collecting phone game, granted! But at least that one is using time I wouldn’t be engrossed in narrative anyway.)

Mr. O’ is actually getting kind of into it, which is great–he and O’Jr. can nerd out together. I think it’s OK, but I can’t seem to get that excited about it. The whole deck-building thing kind of loses me. I mean, I get why it’s fun, there’s a lot of entertainment in mixing and matching and finding just the right combinations if you’re into that…it just feels like inventory management to me, and I tend to be kind of indifferent to that. I’m never that interested in finding THE PERFECT armor and weapons for a character either, you know?

Just gimme something that works OK (ideally a shotgun or a spell that lets me set things on fire) and let’s go do stuff!

Similarly, I’m starting to feel like, give me a Pokemon deck already made and I’ll play, but I can’t get bothered to tinker with it much, and so obviously in a game that’s all about tinkering and building, my deck is going to suck if I don’t work on it, and then I’ll always lose to people who bothered to put in the time and find the right cards for their theme and all. Which is fair! Not complaining. Just saying I don’t think I’m ever going to get super involved in this.

I’m sure you’re surprised.

But hey, check it out, that was actually semi-thoughtful commentary on a game, even if not a video game. Pulling relevance from the jaws of insanity!

It’s how we do.

Or else we just go insane. That’s also a legitimate option.

Also, in response to your starting question, I’m going to rule that you COULD have a fancy dress ball and nudity at the same time, in at least two ways I can think of offhand.

1) Literally have some people naked and some people in fancy dress at the same time.

2) Apply strategically placed fancy dress (and decorative masks, that makes any dress fancy) that leave certain areas exposed. You know…corsets that lace up to just under the breasts, jeweled chaps, etc. Just decorate the clothes you do have until they’re ‘fancy’ and leave enough uncovered to count as ‘nudity.’ (Technically, of course, we could argue someone isn’t ‘nude’ if they’re wearing any clothes at all, but using the movie/game definition of nudity, which basically just means ‘you can see naughty bits,’ I think it’s fine.)

There’s a third way that stretches the definition of “at the same time” to include “within the same scene,” since you could have a bunch of people START in fancy dress and then END UP nude. But it could work depending on how strictly we interpret the question.

The fact that YOU haven’t already thought of these and several other ways to make this happen is a sign of how truly tired you are. Honestly, I’m starting to worry about you, man.

Take a break! Reload TW2 just long enough to enjoy the warm cakes! Something.

Butch:

I was pretty surprised at how we did on Friday. Where’d that come from? Ah, well. Fleeting intelligence is better than total stupidity.

T SHIRT!!!!!

Was it….was it amazing? Holding games in your hands?

This Pokemon thing is a fundamental difference between you and Mr. O. I’m sure, while playing Divinity, he was missing all sorts of good bloggage, but was poring over every stat. It’s how he do. Junior’s the same way, which is why I think he’s going to get religious on Skyrim. And why he loves Pokemon, and Magic, which is even moreso.

And I’m so very surprised that you don’t.

I was even the same way with Gwent. I didn’t monkey with my deck. I got it so it worked fine, then just learned how to outplay everyone. Didn’t have all four decks, just my trusty shotgun/Northern Realms deck. But I think Pokemon and magic are too complex to get away with that, so fuck that noise.

Here’s what I’ve got: that underwater locked chest, in the submerged palace with the piranhas? You don’t want to go back for that. I mean, there was a bit of gold or something and some XP, but you have to swim all the way over there and then all the way back out of that place again. I thought maybe there’d be a way to backtrack and avoid some of the swimming, but no.

So in case you were thinking about that, I’ve saved you some misery. Just looking out for you, dude.

Butch:

True friendship, that. Though the chances of me going back to do extra swimming were slim and none. I mean, shit, I didn’t even swim to get the playboys. Or I wouldn’t have, if I had had to.

Feminina:

Oh, did I forget to mention the locked chests contain Playboys? My bad.

Butch:

Meh. I bet they were REALLY chaste in 2432 BCE.

Feminina:

No, they’re actually the same issues that Mafia 3 used, only it’s all the articles and none of the centerfolds. And unlike Lincoln, Lara comments on every single article, so it gets kind of old.

Ha.

Butch:

She likely reads them, like journals.

Feminina:

You need something to read, on those slow evenings around the campfire.

And Olivia’s dead. And, what do you know? I didn’t kill her! Of course.

Mrs. McP is home today and I have to take Junior to a thing tonight so I won’t have much time to play. So we can save the drug stuff and the party and what THAT was all about for some other time. Today, we’re talking about gender, because of course we are.

Now….here we go.

On one hand, I was impressed (if that’s the right word) that they had the guts to toy with the whole “And now she dies quietly” thing when Lincoln puts his hand on her wound to wake her up, chokes her all “Oh no…where is the guy?” That was more than I thought they’d do. But, again, someone else, offscreen. And then, THEN the whole diatribe from Donovan about how Lincoln would NEVER kill a woman complete with a story saying “Really, REALLY he wouldn’t.”

I am of two minds. On one hand, violence against women is a terrible scourge of society today. Society is, of course, grappling with such issues daily, in public, and graphically. Violence against women is bad. And, as someone who is staunchly in the corner of the good guys in the MeToo movement, glorification and encouragement of violence against women is something that makes me uncomfortable.

HOWEVER, these are games and, in games, violence happens. By insulating women from violence, by saying “It’s ok to kill big, bad, MANLY Kevin but not a delicate, pretty woman,” that’s playing into the “weaker sex” bullshit that, one could argue, is at the root of a lot of the very problems that MeToo is addressing today. Safely wrapping the pretty (white) woman in bubble wrap and protecting her from the big bad (but not that bad) black man is EXACTLY WHAT THE SOUTHERN UNION WANTS TO DO.

But then I go back around and I’m all “But do I want to see a big, strong man kill the hell out of a wounded woman while I’m supposed to be cheering him on? Cuz……no.”

So I don’t know. I think they certainly tried to thread the needle. It was more violent than I thought it was gonna be, but they ALSO protected her.

Indeed, after you told me I could shoot Tommy, I tried to shoot Olivia there. I did. Not because I’m a monster, but because you were all “I showed Tommy some mercy.” Ok, she was suffering, etc.

You can’t kill her. She won’t die. Nope.

So I don’t know. I’m gonna plop all this in your lap, as you are a woman, and you have a better perspective on this. The last thing I want is to mansplain. I feel ooky enough already.

Feminina:

Yup. She is dead, and we didn’t kill her. As you predicted.

And dude, I tried to shoot her too! Because she was in pain, sure, but also because I didn’t trust her not to spring back to life and find a gun of her own. I’ve seen a movie before, man.

And…yeah. All the stuff you said. Having him jabbing at her bullet wound to get more information is farther than you kind of thought they’d go: they didn’t have him completely tiptoe around her like “oh, I could never do harm to a LADY.” (And then we have Donovan coming in and saying essentially just that…though I guess all Donovan really said was he wouldn’t KILL a woman, which leaves completely open the option of torturing one.)

And it was odd that Lincoln’s explanation was “you ain’t worth the time.” Uh…it doesn’t take that much time to shoot someone in the head, dude. Even if we figure he means she’s not worth the time it would take to set up a dramatic scene like burning Remy Duvall on a cross or hanging Doucet from a Ferris wheel–he could still just kill her quickly like he did with the lesser bosses, or the guy running the Southern Union slave racket.

So I don’t buy that it was about time, suggesting that Donovan’s explanation is semi-true, and Lincoln does actually have a philosophical objection to killing women (though not to rubbing salt in their open wounds–which he would totally have done if he’d had salt handy).

And then we’re left with, why does he want to pretend it’s about time, then? Is it not manly to just state that you don’t want to kill women? Or is this in fact a cold burn on the entire female gender, like “women aren’t worth the time it takes to kill them”–you’re so pathetic and meaningless a threat that even the three seconds it would take to stab you would be time better spent looking for a manly Kevin to stab instead? Or maybe he thinks if anyone finds out, they’ll exploit this weakness by sending only women assassins from now on?

Though, also interesting was the way she found the mob stuff “so EXCITING!” She’s lying there dying and reminiscing about how thrilling and (basically) sexy it all was–Donovan also mentions this–and maybe it’s just refusing to play along, when Lincoln walks away instead of giving her an exciting mob death. As he said, “there’s nothing exciting about the mob,” or however he phrased it. He’s not going to prop up her fantasy. (Though he was happy to indulge Remy Duvall’s desire for racist martyrdom.)

And then, as you say, Olivia does wind up violently dead, but he/we didn’t do it. And, as you say and as we’ve talked about before, would we really WANT to have done it? Do we WANT to play a game where we cheerfully kill women?

Generally…no. Unless–and I bring up this every time we have this conversation–it’s a Bethesda game, because nobody does gender equality in Kevins like Bethesda. (Horizon Zero Dawn was also pretty good that way.) If half your randits are women, I will cheerfully murder them all day long, because when you have enough women, your treatment of any particular one becomes less of a Giant Statement About Gender and more about what happened to one character.

Who was trying to kill me, so I killed the hell out of her instead and probably carried her crappy armor around hoping to sell it until I got overencumbered and abandoned it in the road in a giant pile of other crappy loot. That’s Bethesda for you.

This game, I give props for having a fair number of women characters, and for giving those women jobs that are relevant to the action. Cassandra is a good character, and I like Nicki, although not her animations which tended to be creepy (did you have the conversation with Nicki where she says she’s dating a woman? guess that thing with her and Lincoln was just friendship), and Alma was cool, and Gina Kowalski the car thief lady was pretty badass. But they don’t have so many women that they can casually kill them off without it seeming like “hey, this was the part of the story that was about killing a woman.”

Olivia Marcano was the only woman villain, so they can’t avoid that being the story. Hell, we’ve been talking about that story since we learned Olivia existed. Is she going to die? How is she going to die? I bet she dies offscreen! There’s BAGGAGE around this.

Anyway. I thought they threaded the needle reasonably well considering the tricky territory they had to walk through. Olivia was bad, she was part of the Marcano family we’re sworn to destroy, it would seem weird if she just walked away from the whole thing. And making it be the Marcanos themselves turning on her was an interesting symbol of how the family empire is collapsing, as well as a tidy way to say “here, she’s dead but you didn’t have to kill her.”

I personally would also have been OK with Lincoln just shooting her (as I said, I tried), or even making some dramatic statement with her corpse as long as it didn’t involve any grotesque sexual overtones (hello Lara Croft impaled on things). Wrapping her in a Confederate flag and smothering her in a pile of money or something could have worked. But as we know, he didn’t have the time.

I think they would have been able to pull off “this guy kills his enemies and she’s his enemy and there’s no special gender-based antipathy going on,” because in that regard, Lincoln seems like an OK dude. I mean, he treats the women he works with politely, doesn’t hit on them or treat them like his servants or anything. He doesn’t come across like a misogynist, so he could get a pass for equal-opportunity enemy-murdering. Sometimes your enemies are women! It happens!

On the other hand, I understand why they went the other way, and in general I guess I would vote for erring on the side of caution, because…there’s just so much potential for the “haha, I finally got to kill that bitch” or whatever gender-based nastiness, and I’m not into it. So it’s maybe a bit of a cop-out, but it’s one that I understand and don’t really hold against them.

Hm.

Side excursion into the drugs, though, how about that orchestral version of “White Rabbit” playing while everyone’s tripping on LSD? That was awesome.

Butch:

You noticed the music! I’m so proud. That was amazing.

Excellent point about reaching a critical mass of women characters. I guess we’re still hung up on violence against women in video games because we don’t have a lot of games with a critical mass of women in them. Which is also a problem.

As for Lincoln not treating women as servants or not being a misogynist, how do you reconcile all this with the fact he runs prostitution and porn rings? That’s kinda treating women as servants, dude.

Oh, and did you think that Donovan killed her? Who did? Marcano had no reason to. Lincoln didn’t. Leaves Donovan.

Feminina:

Those women are…uh…independent contractors.

But yeah, the prostitution and porn rackets are tough to see as beacons of gender equality. I think the best you can do is “hey, these women need jobs. These jobs pay money. Women will take these jobs. Better our people run them than someone else.”

Because we can optimistically imagine that under Lincoln’s leadership everyone working in the rackets in whatever context is paid a fair wage and treated decently, right? I like to imagine that. So basically, someone’s going to do it, better us than someone with even less interest in little topics like equality and justice.

Also, when I said “not treating women like servants” I was specifically thinking about the stories of men in business settings who assume all the women they see are there to make them coffee or whatever, rather than actually contributing to the work–I just meant that Lincoln treats the women he talks to about business as if they’re contributing to the business. “How’s the racket going, how many stills should I smash up now,” etc., not “fetch me a drink, and let me speak to the man in charge!” or whatever. When we SEE him interacting with women, he treats them fairly.

Does that let him off the hook if, under his direction even if not his immediate supervision, women are suffering ill treatment in the brothels and on the porn sets? No. But like I said…I optimistically assume the prostitutes and porn actors of New Bordeaux make decent money and are treated like human beings doing a job.

The game doesn’t tell us otherwise, after all!

As for Olivia…I gather you didn’t get a certain scene yet that features a person saying “yeah, I killed her.” So it’s a mystery! But one that will be revealed.

Butch:

Oh. No, no I did not get that scene.

I bet it’s Donovan. Why’d he keep that guy around? He wants the land.

Feminina:

All will be revealed.

It’s gonna be great.

Well, I won’t say “all.” There are a number of things that have yet to be made clear.

But at least THAT will be revealed.

Butch:

Yet to be? Still not finished?

We gotta talk about the LSD party, that we do.

And go more into depth about Olivia sexualizing violence and how often women in games are there to sexualize violence and why did she have to do that?

And also, what did you make of the scene where James is all “There won’t be another Bobby Kennedy…another Dr. King. But there will always be another Sal Marcano (Long pause) Another Lincoln Clay” and he turns his back to the camera, and, thus, the player.

I’m not sure I’ve ever played another game that wants you to really, REALLY not like the hero. Or yourself.

Feminina:

Yeah, Olivia’s fondness for the sexy thrilling mob violence was an interesting touch. I mean, she’s not alone–pop culture kind of glamorizes the mob. I don’t know to what extent that was true in 1968 (looks like The Godfather wasn’t published until ’69, but there were James Cagney movies and so forth before that), but assuming they did some research for the game, and that this was the case even then…she’s not alone.

She is, though, sort of weirdly buying into/living out a fantasy instead of approaching it like a business. Sal’s all about the money, but it’s implied Olivia was just in it for the drama.

Hm.

Father James’ assessment was bleak, all right. “The good people who might have changed things are gone, and we’re left with the violent ones who are just battling it out for territory”?

He REALLY doesn’t think much of Lincoln’s motivations (or, perhaps, the ultimate results of Lincoln’s quest, which he’s in a better position to evaluate than we are).

Which suggests that violence is not the answer, and also kind of says to the player “all your efforts were wasted. Things still suck.”

Which…is a fair criticism considering all we’ve been doing is sitting there playing a game.

Fair, James. Harsh, but fair.

Butch:

But that’s also a little sexist. If Sal is in it for the money, and Remy’s in it for devotion to a cause, a crazy cause, mind you, but a cause, that means that the woman is only in it for selfish and emotional reasons, not something that “matters.” The game also established that anybody who has any kind of slightly abnormal sexual preferences must be evil and we’re seeing more of that here. Not to mention the trope of the sexual woman being flawed. She’s the only woman in the game who seems to have any interest in sex, and she’s evil. Hell, it’s the REASON she’s evil.

That’s a tad judgy.

By the way, are you finished?

Feminina:

Yeah, it is. As you say, the entire game is kind of judgy about sex that isn’t Playboy centerfolds and Vargas pinups (which is a REALLY airbrushed and vanilla approach), and if non-vanilla men are all murderous perverts, there’s no way they’d let a woman get away with any kind of unorthodox inclinations.

To the game’s credit, it’s not filled with titillating visits to strip clubs and stuff (as we discussed, when you do see naked women in-game, as opposed to the collectibles, it tends to be pretty unsexy). So many opportunities to dramatize women dancing and acting out sexuality for porn sets, and they didn’t take them!

And no, I haven’t finished, but this close to the end I think it’s probably safe to say that there will be no in-game nudity on the part of any of the major characters. It’s true that aside from Olivia (and possibly Nicki, dating a woman) none of the female characters seem to have any interest in sex, but it’s also true that none of the male characters do either (aside from the “VIP” perverts and the nameless NPCs who frequent the brothel and buy stag films).

Lincoln? Vito? Burke? Emmanuel? Heck, even the villains…we never see Georgi or Sal or Lou or Tommy with half-naked women draped over them, or hanging out in strip bars, or any of the standard tropes for “these are just manly men chilling, and also an excuse to show you some nudity!”

This GAME doesn’t seem to be that interested in sex. Which is funny considering its rating for nudity, and all the nude collectibles, but honestly, when do any actual characters do anything? Never. They don’t even look at the magazines!

Really, it’s a plain-vanilla, teenage-boy-in-the-’50s idea of sex: let’s look at some pretty pictures of naked women and have done with it. Everything else is a criminal enterprise and/or a perversion.

Butch:

Hmm. Good point about the bad guys. And Lincoln! Both, in other games, WOULD have sexy women draped all over them.

This game, so often, was a game of extremes. Good gameplay innovations, then stock shooting mechanics. Excellent levels, then tedium. And, really, its themes. In some ways, it’s incredibly progressive, maybe the most progressive game I’ve ever played in how it goes there on race and politics. And then, as you say, when it comes to sex it’s stuck in the fifties. And gender? It makes SOME waves at it (Cassandra and Nicki are good characters), but then falls back on tropes late (My predictions of Olivia dying off screen by someone else’s hand were serious all along, and I’m not at all surprised I’m right).

I always like to hold out final judgments on games until they’re over and done with, but man, I don’t think I’ve ever had a game that whipsawed between extremes of how I feel about it week to week, day to day, even hour to hour.

Being all “Oh yeah, the slave auction was the Capital S Something” when you knew I was going to burn Remy Duvall on a cross.

On a damn cross.

Now THAT’S a Capital S Something, isn’t it?

Olivia got a reprieve cuz I had to ponder that Capital S Something.

A lynching from a Ferris Wheel? One thing. But DAMN talk about a whole lot of symbolism… DAMN.

You first. I’m still pondering.

Oh, and I’m worried. Why? Cuz in the news reports, there’s the cop being all “We’re at WAR! We have to round ’em all up and shoot ’em!” And I was thinking “Hmm…maybe I should’ve stolen that police truck for Cassandra…she might want to have some guns about now….”

Is this the time of the game where your laziness comes back to haunt you?

If it is, well, sorry Cassandra. I mean, I DO have to start TR sometime….

Feminina:

Ha. The funny thing is, I hadn’t burned Remy Duvall on the cross yet when I first got all worked up about this bit, so I genuinely was only referring to the slave auctions at the time, and TECHNICALLY Remy Duvall is not part of taking over the racket…so I was telling the truth.

In a coy and devilish manner.

But yeah, that was something. The logical end point, I suppose, of using the tools of the oppressor against him. Interesting how Duvall sort of curses at Lincoln, who says “have it your way” before we cut to the burning cross…suggesting that he was actually planning to just stab him, but if you’re going to insist, fine, let’s make a dramatic statement out of it.

Which is a bit odd, because no one’s ever needed to convince him to make dramatic statements before. I mean, since we did the Pagani/Cuba/Tommy part before this, it could maybe be seen as Lincoln starting to think about maybe possibly just a little bit toning it down in the wake of the bit of reflection he seemed to do in that district, only Duvall egged him on with his determined racism (just when I think I’m out!)…but what if we’d done this first? That was certainly an option.

I suppose in that case it could read as “he was already kind of getting tired of the bloody drama, but Duvall egged him on to one final big gesture, and then in the Pagani part he really started to reflect”…I dunno.

As for your question about the cops, I don’t actually know. Nothing more came of it in my game (so far, anyway) — I haven’t had any radio news updates with “cops descend on the Hollow, are repelled by gunfire from a mysteriously heavily armed populace” or anything. That police declaration of war certainly seems like the kind of thing that would matter, but…I don’t know if it does.

Some other things I thought were interesting about this bit:

When you take over the racket, there’s no option to recruit the boss (and this was not about wiretapping, I had all the junction boxes). You just kill him. So this was an unforgivable crime, to Lincoln–he’s not interested in working with this guy. (Fair! I wouldn’t want to work with him either.)

And then when he calls someone to take over the racket, he says “just so you know, we’re not going to be selling people. Find some other way to make money off it.”

And as I said, I did this right after the riverboat, so it was an interesting contrast with me thinking “man, all these civilians and boat workers, he really doesn’t care who gets in his way, he IS kind of a monster” (as we discussed), and then coming here and seeing that OK, there is a line he won’t cross, he’s not COMPLETELY a monster. There are things he’s not willing to do.

Hm.

Also, did you hear that conversation between the two guys as you’re first sneaking up on the Southern Union meeting? About how the only thing worse than a [black person], is a rich white man in a robe? How they always talk a big game, but when it comes to someone getting their hands dirty, it’s always going to be the little guys (the working class pamphlet distributors, as we talked about yesterday).

An interesting recognition of class divisions, which, since they’re all there working on the same thing despite these complaints, hints at the way racism can be useful to a ruling class: hatred of one group (uniformly defined by skin color) keeps another group (uniformly defined by skin color) from turning on people with whom they’d otherwise have nothing in common, and whom they’d perhaps have considerable reason to resent.

“Even though I’m rich and you’re poor and you work for me, it’s not my fault! It’s those OTHER people! It’s all their fault!”

A classic line that never gets old.

Butch:

Well, I think that part of it comes down to the other metaphor here, the person tied to a cross. Martyrdom.

I found it telling that the first thing you hear when you get to the place is Kevin complaining about rich white people. “Only thing worse than a black person is a white person putting on airs” or something. Pointing out that they talk big, but when it’s actually time to go out and actually be all violently racist, they retreat to their country clubs.

Which one would think would apply to Duvall. The only time we saw him before he died he was in a suit, in a luxury place, hardly getting his hands dirty. He “fights” from behind a microphone. Shit, he even denied BEING in the Southern Union.

So really, for all his talk, we have every reason to side with Kevin here, that he’s all talk and bluster and is happy to rile up the mob but not to join it.

And yet, here he is, prattling on about his ancestors and their sacrifice (see where I’m going?) and how “we all” must be part of the fight and all that. Even when everyone really knows that when he says “we all” he means “Kevin.”

So I think Lincoln’s “Have it your way” might be him saying “Hey, you want to be a martyr for your cause? He ya go, pal. You say suffering for the white race is important? Have it your way.” Duvall talked a big game about being part of the struggle. He’s not drawing Lincoln in. Lincoln is making sure that he doesn’t go back to the country club. Lincoln’s giving Duvall what he SAYS he’s always wanted: to be a racial martyr, just like granddaddy.

On cops, Ok, but you still got that bit with the chief being all “THIS IS WAR!!!!” even though you did all Cassandra’s stuff? Cuz then I’d feel a little better.

Yeah, I did notice that you couldn’t recruit the guy. I can’t tell if they’re doing all that because they want to make sure we know that there are things that Lincoln won’t do cuz hero or whatever, or if they knew that this game was going to be played by people who are not criminals, who would have the reaction I had (“Dude…I don’t want to take over that racket…”) and this was less a narrative decision as a “placate the player” decision. Even if, narratively, there’s places a protagonist will go, games often realized that we, the players, might refuse to go there with him (or her). This might’ve just been that.

Ironically, here, when you have a heart, I called Burke and, in the cutscene when the cars drive up, his guys ran over and killed not one, but two pedestrians.

“Innocent people can’t be harmed, so run over dudes on the way, ok, Burke?”

And yes, a classic line, but is it Duvall’s way of thinking? The argument he had with Olivia before this was an interesting thing. He is sitting there all “THIS ISN’T ABOUT A CASINO!” which could be read as “There’s more to life than money, there’s zealous belief in stuff (something that could be said about Lincoln, too)” or it could be read as “Fool! You think a casino will keep you rich? Not when the whole order of everything is being challenged. Look at the big picture or we’re doomed! (Which would be harder to say about Lincoln….Donovan, maybe.)”

Feminina:

Very good point about the martyr aspect, and how Lincoln is maybe just giving Duvall what he says he wants. Hey, now he’s a fallen hero in the eyes of all those working class jerks who were sneering at him half an hour ago! It’s the best possible outcome for him!

There’ll be a statue of Remy Duvall in Downtown 20 years from now, mark my words. Because of heritage.

Well, maybe not if the Haitian mob is still running the place.

I did think about that–whether or not the game is just cutting the player some slack figuring WE don’t want to go there. Because I’m so automatic on recruiting, I probably WOULD have recruited the guy, just out of habit, and then felt icky about it. Maybe the game is doing me a favor by not having that be a choice.

I also idly considered how maybe Lincoln could have kept the racket but started selling white people instead, if they wanted to reverse the whole thing. He’s got this endless supply of Kevins, after all…just knock them out instead of killing them and that’s a great labor pool! And we could argue it serves them right for trying to kill us! And hey, at least they’d be alive! But, you know, it would also be monstrous.

Plus, you’d probably have to work that through the prison system, since that’s how we mostly manage forced labor these days (bribe some prison officials, get these dudes into the system, rent them out for chain gangs, easy as pie!), and the prison system is a whole other piece of the huge, crushingly unjust story of the black experience in the US, and one that’s pretty much untouched in this game. Maybe they didn’t want to get into it.

Also, it would be a lot harder to think of Lincoln as not a monster. It works more smoothly in a lot of ways, I think, if we just say that no, this is the line he won’t cross. And I can buy that. It’s a pretty good line to not cross, so it works.

Butch:

Though watch: The irony will be that they aren’t, that we just made everything worse by bringing the cops and the rich and the whites rage down on the Haitians, they’ll all be dead and in jail, and there WILL be a statue of him downtown. Cuz that’s the kind of shit that actually happens.

But you’re done, so you know that, so don’t spoil.

Right…the game is kind of doing us a favor. Plus, a big part of a game is being able to connect with your character in some way. We have to WANT to be the character. Players are able to forgive a lot in a character, but if things cross a certain line, we might not want to be that character anymore. Once that happens, poof, the game suffers. There has to be that link. So even if we choose not to recruit the boss or something, if we “know” that it’s something that “crossed Lincoln’s mind,” that might turn us off Lincoln for good.

Yes, yes, yes, he, and, like, every game character ever, does bad things. But players, including us, have things we overlook and things we don’t.

It is telling that Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang” came on during this particular racket, and I don’t recall hearing it before.

Prison would have been tough. There’s only so much one game can get into. And this game got into a lot.

It does.

I do wonder what they ARE doing there. It just says “A safehouse to lie low and keep an eye on the rich.” But what’s the earn?

Groceries. They went straight.

Feminina:

I did think that was kind of awesome. “Yup, this is a grocery store. We, uh…we sell groceries.”

And keep an eye on the rich. In case the revolution comes and we rise up against them, or they want to buy some groceries in the meantime.

Good point about “Chain Gang” coming on here! I heard that as well, but forgot about it. I did notice them doing a few interesting things with the music around this part of the game.

You’ll hear it. You always hear more than I do.

Also, I have not finished, as I did not play last night. Kid lunches, kid laundry, Halloween prep, etc. So I don’t know how it ends, and whether or not there’s a statue of Remy Duvall in Downtown (though you’re right, that’s totally the kind of thing that would actually happen).

Butch:

Even the rich occasionally need to pop in for a snack cake.

I have to say, even though it was in one of my rackets, I didn’t take the cash that was sitting there on the register. Didn’t feel right. The nice cashier lady was right there.

They do seem to have certain songs queued up for certain things. I heard White Rabbit a lot more when I was doing the drug bits.

Wait….there’s a chance we’d finish a game….at the SAME TIME? Even CLOSE to the same time?

I don’t know how to cope with that.

That statue of Remy would actually happen, and kind of has. When a family member got married, I had some free time to wander around Charleston, South Carolina. Lovely city. Lots of nice shops, great restaurants, you’d like it. And, by southern standards anyway, rather liberal (like, not New England liberal, but certainly more hipster chic than other parts of the South).

And near the center of downtown they have a rather lovely holocaust memorial. Small, but rather moving. It’s a block away from the famous black church (that recently got shot up by that white nationalist). It’s all in and near a lovely park. Serene. Respectful. Full of the history of triumph over suffering, of resistance, of progress.

And all of it under the shadow of a three story tall column and statue of John C. Calhoun.

And there you have it.

Feminina:

There you have it, indeed.

I often didn’t take the cash from my rackets either! I felt bad about possibly making it harder for people to do their jobs. It was like, “well, this is technically mine anyway, but hey, I want you to be able to make change if a customer comes in.”

I often didn’t rob the cash register at small stores in general, actually. Lincoln Clay isn’t out to hurt the little guy! Not specifically, that is. Not unless the little guy’s in a racket he’s trying to take down.

OK, there are a lot of qualifications on that statement, but basically, Lincoln Clay’s beef is with the Man, not with the local shopkeeper.

Keep your money, my good man! The med pack in your restroom, on the other hand, that’s mine.

Butch:

I, too, have not stolen from local businesses. Even the racist segregated ones!

I have pillaged their nudie mags, but they can keep their money. And their Hot Rods. And their album covers.

Ahem.

Feminina:

Shopkeeper coming into work in the morning:

“Oh no, the lock is broken! I’ve been robbed! …Well, it looks like the cash is all here…that’s not so ba—OH MY GOD the Playboy is gone!!!!! Why, WHY couldn’t he have just taken the money! That was my retirement magazine! There was only $12 in the register and he had to take the ONE THING I cherished!”

Oh well, you tried.

Butch:

You may be right. These dudes MUST cherish them. I mean, shit, some of them are five years old.

“Five years, and the only thing of value I have is taken from me….”

I’m a monster.

Feminina:

“That centerfold was the only reason I managed to drag myself out of bed every morning…might as well just go overdose on adrenaline now—WHAT???? The med pack is empty too????!!!”

[Goes outside and steps into traffic: is instantly run over by reckless driver who may or may not be Lincoln Clay or one of his many associates.]

Butch:

Nah. Decides to cheer up by getting a snack cake at the local grocery store. Is run over by Irishmen.

Twice.

Seriously. Cut to green cars, first one just takes OUT a woman. Then the next car runs her over AND her friend.

Dudes.

Yet another reason to stay inside with your five year old Playboy. Much safer than snack cakes.

Feminina:

Much, much safer. It’s what I would do every single day, if I didn’t have to go out to find Pokemon.

Well, here we go again. Played, again, and this time destroyed stag films, which was a whole lot like destroying TVs, drugs and contraband. Killed some of this guy’s enforcers, which was a whole lot like killing the other guy’s enforcers. Didn’t follow some red cars, which were a lot like the other red cars I ignored.

I’ve played a lot this week. I have. Every night, even, which is rare for me. And NOTHING HAS HAPPENED.

For a game where “Every player’s story is different,” WHERE’S THE STORY????

Sigh.

But since it’s nudity Friday, and we need SOMETHING to talk about, and we are, apparently, a game blog, I give you this to start:

This game has a lot to say about morality, at least in regards to race. But sex? I’m confused. We’ve talked on collectible nudity. The game has no problem sending players out to collect playboys and Vargas prints for no real reason. But now? A “sex” racket that is the same as “drugs” or even the gruesome “garbage” one. Stag films being treated the same as PCP. And, like media often does, treating anyone who isn’t into “normal” things in the bedroom as a sadistic pervert who, in this case, deserves to die.

That’s a shit ton of moralizing from a game with collectible Playboys.

Feminina:

Well, that is what people mainly complained about in this game, isn’t it? Here we go again…

For some reason I’m not really minding it, possibly because I’m easily entertained, but you’re certainly not wrong about each territory being basically the same.

Following the plan, I killed Butterbean (there wasn’t even a chance I wouldn’t, as I needed to do several thousand dollars worth of damage still), gave the racket to Burke, then went back and talked to Donovan and got the other side of the tracker for Pagani’s car. Went over to that place where I’ve known for weeks there was a Vargas print but I figured I’d come fight someone there at some point so never went after it. Got the Vargas print, but Pagani drove off. I was too busy grabbing the print to chase him. Then it was bedtime.

Is your tip to block the exits with something so he can’t drive off? Because that’s what I’m planning on trying next time. Figure if I can park a big truck or something in the way, shoot out the tires so it won’t move…

There are some pretty shiny convertibles right there that I’m probably supposed to jump in to race after him, but…meh. I can always take one of them later and NOT smash it up in a car chase.

Unless you already tried that and it didn’t work.

As for the sex…hm. That’s an interesting take. I didn’t read it so much as a shaming of all non-vanilla sex, as of drawing a “this goes too far even for us” line. I mean, one of the VIPs I killed had in the description that he’d hidden bodies of girls in drainpipes, or something.

Unless you mean the game is implying that every non-vanilla sex act is essentially as bad as murdering women for kicks? That in its depiction of these truly twisted VIPs, it’s equating “not-normal” with “homicidal”?

I guess I could see that. I mean, you’re right that we don’t have significant examples of “OK, this will strike most people as a bizarre fetish, but consensual adults! so rock on” or anything.

As for the fact that we burn the stag films, I didn’t see that as a moral statement, any more than destroying all those shiny cars seemed like a moral statement about our national love of fancy automobiles. Yes, stag films are treated the same as PCP, but they’re also treated the same as stolen cars, weed, or smuggled slot machines. Destroying them is just wrecking the inventory to hurt the business, and I figured Lincoln will be fine with selling them as soon as he’s the one profiting, the same as he is with cars (or guns, or PCP, or…).

And I definitely agree that from our standpoint it’s odd that there even IS a racket in stag films, that nudity is in fact in the same category as stolen cars, illegal drugs, etc. — THAT could feel like a moral statement — but before the internet, people had to get nudity somewhere, and with restrictive obscenity laws…if it’s against the law, who better than organized crime to handle it?

So I see your point, but I’m not sure I completely agree that this is moralizing on the part of the game. But, as we discussed with the Brothel that Became La Perla, prostitution is tricky. It’s hard not to take some kind of moral stance, and even trying too hard not to is basically a stance of its own, so…yeah.

DISCUSS FURTHER!

Butch:

It’s not just that the territories are the same. I have no problem with things being very similar. Fine. But there’s a whole lot of similar between story drops. There should be more story drops more frequently. If, say, three days this week were pretty much the same, but there was a really good, really themey thing mixed in, that would be one thing. But that’s not what’s happening, and that’s a shame.

No, no I thought of parking something in the way. I thought of that. I very studiously stole, like, four cars, put them just so, and, when he drove off, poof, they were gone.

Because it’s SUPPOSED to be a car chase.

You are very much supposed to take a shiny convertible and follow him, Grecco style. I know this, as, when you jump into said convertible, there’s dialog and banter and shit. This is obviously what the scene is. That’s why the convertibles are so shiny, so when he bolts, you think “Hey! THAT car!”

That said…..

Remember how awful Grecco was? And you were STARTING in a car! This, you’re flat footed, so he gets a CRAZY head start on you, and he’s REALLY fast. Indeed, you find he used to RACE CARS.

So yes, you’re supposed to race after him.

And yes, I tried it, and it didn’t work. Over, and over, and over again. Controller throwing rage.

But I came up with a hack/cheat/brilliance. And you’re close in your thinking. That you are.

No game has examples of “rock on consensual adults. Ever. Games like to throw sex around as collectible nudity, or “prizes” for romance. Occasionally, yes, we see good romantic sex that’s relevant to the plot. But EVERY time ANYTHING is non vanilla, it’s “bodies in drainpipes.” Either it’s totally vanilla, or it’s bodies in drainpipes.

Which sort of goes to you feeling alienated by the Playboys. That was a case of “sexy things in games are naked women, ergo for men.” It’s narrow. We’re just coming to the point where there’s gay options in games, and even THOSE are often aimed at some straight male vision of gay (especially lesbian) sex. Game sex is either playboys, vanilla or, at best, gay sex that’s either sexy lesbians or fade to black men. Anything else? You MUST be a villain! Bodies in drainpipes!

And that’s weird. If you’re going to be “mature” about things, then be mature.

(Note to readers: I am not saying this to defend my lifestyle. I do not have any interesting proclivities. I barely do anything. I have no lifestyle. Why? I have three children.)

I don’t think it’s INTENTIONAL moralizing. But if you’re gonna go there on a lot of sensitive topics (including race and class), your own morals are gonna seep in no matter what. We’ve talked before about how this game, yes, goes there on race in ways that are progressive by game standards, but we still can and should remember that the people making it are white men and that affects the way they approach race, whether they want it to or not, or even KNOW it or not.

The same thing’s true with sex. Games are usually made by straight white men, and, while I can give the developers the benefit of the doubt and say they weren’t trying to alienate you, but simply trying to be “mature” or something, their own approach to “mature sexiness” seeped in, whether they wanted it to or not or KNEW it.

And so any game that’s going to draw lines and say “This sex is ok, this sex is not” is taking a moral stand, intentional or otherwise.

I think your idea of “Lincoln will be fine with selling them” almost makes the moral statement worse. That implies “Sexy things are fine if I do them, but not if YOU do them,” and that stance on ANYTHING, sex or otherwise, is troublesome.

Feminina:

Ah! Well, at least I know not to try blocking the gate. I will ponder. And if there’s banter, maybe I’ll at least jump in a car and pretend to try chasing him once, so I get the witty writing.

OK, I see what you mean about sex. And yes, we really don’t ever have “these people are totally off the wall sexually, but it’s all in good fun and they all like it so it’s fine and doesn’t imply anything sinister about their character.” Which would be kind of awesome! You wander in on someone and their partner in bondage gear or something, and you say “oh, sorry, I should have knocked” and leave. (After grabbing their collectible off the end table. Which was probably what you were there for.) End scene, person never shows up later as a serial killer. Maybe they show up later as a responsible small business owner or something.

Because you’re right, non-vanilla pretty much always implies something sinister, and not just (or even primarily) in games–media in general tends to assume this. (“Fifty Shades of Grey” notwithstanding.)

And yes, the (mainly white male) viewpoint of the writers is absolutely going to come through. And yes, this doesn’t really anyone off the hook, but I agree that’s it’s likely largely unintentional, and as much laziness as anything. I mean, particularly in action-focused media, why would someone’s non-vanilla sexuality even come up if it weren’t a plot point? If this isn’t a long, sprawling novel where details about peoples’ character get thrown in just to add to the richness of the tapestry, then if something is in there, it probably MEANS something. And if it MEANS something, most of the time it’s going to mean something sinister and negative because that’s the easy route. And it’s the easy route because of preconceptions, and the fact that even though we don’t know anything about the sex lives and practices of 99.9999% of characters we see or read about in any media, we just assume “normal” and our “normal” is absolutely shaped by cultural definitions of normal (as well as our own lifestyles or lack of them).

As for “sexy things are fine if I do them, but not if you do them”…you’re totally right that this is completely wrong logically, but isn’t it also KIND OF what a lot of people secretly believe?

I mean, it’s an unquestioned joke-not-a-joke that no one wants to believe their own parents have sex. “My parents had sex three times, because there’s me and my two siblings” is pretty much universally a “haha but also we totally get that the idea is disgusting” joke.

And jokes about how horrifying it is to imagine [fat people/ugly people/disabled people/any people the teller finds unattractive] having sex are not uncommon. (Especially WOMEN the teller finds unattractive. Attractive women should have sex with any man who wants them/proves worthy of them through feats of strength or daring, because they are the logical prize for all success in life, but unattractive women should probably not exist, and even if they do, they should DEFINITELY never have sex except maybe as a joke.)

Which is pretty close to “it’s OK for me [and a subset of humanity approved by me] but not for you [assuming you are not within my approved subset].”

And this is not even getting into the hypocrisy of religious sexual abuse, or morally upstanding traditional-marriage-supporting politicians who get caught paying other men for sex or whatever. It’s OK when I do it!

Or maybe not actually OK, but basically OK because I’m morally aware enough to REPENT later and try to make it illegal for anyone else to do it. It’s all about repentance, isn’t it? It’s not doing something forbidden that’s the real sin, it’s doing it and not feeling REALLY HORRIBLY BAD about it before you do it again.

And, to bring it back around to the game, aren’t WE the real sinners? We keep murdering hundreds of dudes and not feeling even a tiny bit bad about it! Even though, as far as we know, most of those dudes probably lead perfectly normal, vanilla sex lives!

Butch:

Well, you’ll at least see how the game WANTS you to do it if you do the car chase. Try to stop before there is fury.

He will come out of the garage door that, as you face the garage, is to your right.

Which you can’t block with cars, no. Not with cars.

Media does imply that kink is sinister.

I mean, look at games that revel in sex. Geralt was banging anything that moved. And yet we saw two non vanilla people in that game: Junior and the cross dressing elf who was…awkward.

So, yeah.

Which, again, isn’t cool. Common, yes. But not cool. And this game is challenging uncool things that are all too common in terms of race relations. It certainly feels, projects, moral superiority on those grounds. We’re supposed to LIKE killing Dixie folks. Look how woke!

And then it has these rather icky, traditional notions on sex that Remy Duvall would be proud of.

Kill Pagani. We’ll talk. Later.

If you kill Pagani. DAMN that was irksome.

Feminina:

Ha–speaking of Pagani and normal, vanilla sex lives, did you overhear a couple of the dudes chatting before you murdered them, something like,
“should I ask out Allison who works in the office?”
“You mean the woman who’s the daughter of your boss? Your boss who is a murderous psychopath?”
“So you don’t think I should?”
“Why don’t you survive the killer [slur] who’s stalking us all and then decide.”

I felt a moment of genuine human empathy for them, just a couple of dudes doing a job, trying to survive killer me long enough to decide whether or not it was a good idea to ask a woman out. Then, it being pretty much my cue, I obviously murdered them both. But way to make Kevin briefly and very slightly sympathetic!

But yes, I agree, falling back on notions like “it’s OK if I do it” is, again, probably more habit than a thought-out moral stance, but is not less deserving of critique based on that.

Butch:

I did get that! And I actually thought about things a little before going that way, like, can I spare these dudes?

Man, we’re SO gonna talk later if and when you kill Pagani.

I do like that they’re trying to make Kevin more sympathetic, and ramping up the ambient fear in Kevin. They keep talking about how scary it’s getting, how maybe it’s not worth it, etc.

The problem, as it so often is with games, is integrating that into gameplay. Yes, here are those guys all “Maybe I’ll do this thing that might make me happy..but I’m scared I’ll be killed by the nasty man killing us all….” But then, immediately, he hears a whistle and instead of doing what someone WOULD do who wants to survive a man who is stalking and killing people so he can ask a girl out, that is, run, or at least get spooked and ask for help, he casually wanders toward the sound.

I mean, shit. I’m still so freaked out about bats that every time a light flickers or I see something out of the corner of my eye I get all defensive (not proud of that, but whatever). I do NOT get all “Huh? Let me stroll towards it.” Scared Kevin still does.

But gameplay gotta gameplay. It’s a problem games have.

Feminina:

So true! If I knew someone was killing all my co-workers, I would–well, I probably stop going to work, but even if I kept going, I would be so on edge I was opening fire at shadows and not taking a step without a companion right behind me.

But Kevin is fearless at all the worst times (for him).

Butch:

Brave? Yes. Loyal? To a fault. Persistent? You bet.

Intelligent? Not so much.

Feminina:

And by “so much,” we mean “at all.”

We don’t hire Kevin for brains or independent thought or the ability to notice when someone is running up behind him with a big knife. We hire him for blind obedience and unwavering determination in the face of impossible odds, and that he delivers.

I, for one, salute him.

With a big knife. Before feeding him to the alligators.

Butch:

Bravo, Kevin. Bravo.

We started so well today.

Feminina:

We can only maintain that level of thoughtful discourse for so long.

And by “so long” we mean “approximately half an hour.”

Butch:

Indeed.

It seems that, every week, I say something like “But we started so well.”

So, as you know, in our long history of blogging there are days when we don’t do much cuz I didn’t play. This game? I did play I played a good hour and a half. Maybe two. But we’re not gonna do much cuz here’s what I got:

Killed about 298253795 Kevins. Vito’s got the TV racket. Started on the next racket in Southdowns.

That about sums it up.

The “it gets repetitive” criticisms were valid.

Feminina:

I went up to Frisco Fields, talked to the drug dude and the IRS lady (nice touch, that the IRS is interested) and blew up some chemicals and some white supremacist literature. I like how they keep that in explosive boxes. It makes things easier for me.

It’s funny because over the weekend I basically couldn’t do anything without dying–I mean, I’d succeed in the mission, but die and have to reload after. Last night, it was one of those sessions where everything went smoothly–I drove all over the place, hit 6 or 7 different locations, and never died at all.

Just as in life, sometimes in games the same damn thing is easy, and sometimes it’s hard.

Oh, and I killed that guy up there that Vito wanted me to kill (which actually worked out incredibly well because he and his pals were right next door to some PCP guys, so while I was murdering all the PCP guys, other guys would wander over from the card game and I’d murder them too, so by the time I was done with the PCP chemicals Lucky was pretty much the only one left at the card game. Heh).

Now I need to go talk to Vito, but he’s far away, so I didn’t do it last night. It was also one of those sessions where you’re way out in the middle of nowhere and thinking “I might as well try to do THIS thing too, because if I stop now I’ll reload back in the hotel or something and have to drive all the way out here again.”

I do have to go back and try to wrap up the French Ward, though. Speaking of Vito. He needs his territory.

Butch:

SO nice of them. The TVs, too. Very explosive. And they must hide some dynamite in their slot machines. Those are pesky, buggers, though. Stealthy. Yesterday I saw a slot machine, all shiny in that “shoot me” way, in a laundromat. Decided to snipe it with my silenced thingy (which I LOVE)….and missed. And they called the cops.

I half expected “All units, we have a report of some doofus who can’t hit a big fucking slot machine when he’s standing perfectly still and has forever to aim. Please use caution, but not that much.”

Dude, I have the same thing going on with this game, easy then hard. That I do. Yesterday, I died more than I can say.

Of course, is it just me, or do the sentry called reinforcements kick MAJOR ass? Those guys are like Kevin’s big, nasty, mean assed cousins. I kill, like 78 Kevins, then “REINFORCEMENTS ARRIVED” and ten seconds later I’m dead. Why don’t they just let THOSE dudes guard their special stuff?

You know, as I was walking around in ovals this morning (one must stick with fitness!) I had a thought that is relevant to what you just said: This game obviously wants us to get to know and to care about Cassandra, Emmanuel, Burke, Nicki, Vito and Alva. And I kinda do! It wants us to talk to them, what with those little icons. And I DO want to talk to them! But, as you say “Now I need to go talk to Vito, but he’s far away, so I didn’t do it last night.”

If you want NPCs to have a lot to say, and you want to dole that stuff out over time, like good RPGs do, you have to make those NPCs rather accessible. Shit, I was pissed when I had to truck all the way to the back of the Tempest to talk to dudes. Pissed when I couldn’t find the stairs to Cullen’s parapet in Skyhold (which was EVERY TIME). No fucking WAY am I gonna drive halfway around town just to talk to Alva, even if I want to. Time’s too precious.

AND! AND! There’s no way I’m gonna truck to Vito knowing a damn hit squad could pop and kill me at any moment. Shit, trucking around the Tempest and Skyhold was time consuming enough, and that DIDN’T have the risk of death and reloading way the fuck far away.

So the game wants us to do this stuff, we want to do this stuff, and the game, once again, can’t get out of its own way and let us do it.

What’s odd is that they COULD have had a central hub. One is baked right in: the abandoned plantation house where the sit downs happen. There could have been a mechanic where everyone just chills there. Donovan is upstairs doing his do, everyone has their own little place, they’re talking on the phone to underbosses, whatever. You could stash gear, it would have made some sense. Shit, when there was a wardrobe and a safe and stuff in Sammy’s bar, I thought they were going to use that. But they didn’t. For anyone. And they should have, so we could have at least talked to everyone like we do in bioware games.

I’m giving Vito televisions. And slot machines. When I get there. But first I have to go rescue a boxer (a fighter, not a dog) way the fuck down in the bayou. It’ll have to wait.

You could wrap up Pagani. Then we could talk.

Feminina:

Yeah, I need to work on Pagani. The game keeps giving me this notice about him. “STORY MISSION: The connection to Cuba” or whatever. “Go do this thing!!!!”

Enh…it’s way over there….I’m way over here…

I do like long drives when I’m listening to something on the radio–if only there were a way to time it. Last night I had to just sit in the car for a few minutes after I got somewhere to finish up radio segments, twice. At one point a suspicious dude with a group I was going to attack kept coming closer to the car, bit by bit, and I had to keep backing up, until the show was over and I could jump out and murder him already.

I don’t want to miss what the Voice of the Hollow is saying! An interesting ‘buy local’ plea, about the Briar Patch restaurant and the racist amusement park (hello, loup-garou story!) and how it doesn’t make sense to keep spending money at establishments run by people who hate and scorn you.

And then a Native Son interview with Olivia Marcano, talking about how everyone just has to EARN things, and if certain people haven’t put in the effort, well, obviously they can’t be part of the group. It’s not that we have RULES against certain types of people, you know, it’s just that they haven’t earned it.

Butch:

I’d be happy to give you the time saving tip. Cuz otherwise, be prepared to drive. A lot.

Dude that happens all the time with the radio. I think “Well, might as well drive there. Mrs. McP’s almost home, gonna need to make dinner….” and I hop in and “NATIVE SOOOOOON” and I’m like “Shit, Remy, talk fast. Faster. This was not in the plan.”

And DUDE that’s the very NATIVE SOOOOOON that got me last night. I had, like, two blocks to drive and that came on.

What I caught was that Olivia didn’t seem to be quite as awful as Duvall. She said “Well, everyone should have the opportunity…” and Duvall cut her off. Don’t get me wrong: she’s awful. But she did seem at least a little less passionate about awful racism as Duvall.

So the game will probably spare her a gruesome on screen death. Because of that. For no other reason.

Feminina:

That’s true. She WAS willing to acknowledge that in theory everyone should have a fair chance.

We shall have mercy! Her grisly death shall take place offscreen.

Or else we’ll snap her neck with our bare hands. Or maybe inject her with an overdose of her own drugs so she dies in a calm coma? So many choices!

Butch:

I’m betting off screen.

Cuz she’s….uh…..

Do Pagani tonight. If you’re going to have to drive, might as well drive towards something I’ve done.

Plus, it opens up Southdowns with its slot machine/boxing/gambling rackets.

Feminina:

Ah, right–so the gambling we wondered about a few days back has finally turned up! Would have been an odd omission. But, paced as it is, it does kind of fit narratively as we draw closer to the planned casino.

I will definitely not miss the sparkling slot machines, either. (I probably will.)

Butch:

Just don’t, you know, MISS them. Cuz that’s just embarrassing.

You know, a big part of the reason I was making real headway in this game (at least the main story) was there was no reason I had to go to the bayou. Everything was nice and close to everything else. This shit here is just way too far out the damn way.

I just hope I find out why the boss of this racket is named Jimmy “Two Dicks.” For real.

Actually…I hope I don’t find out.

Feminina:

Yeah…that might be the kind of thing we’re better off not knowing.

Butch:

Hey man, you’re the one who is always asking them to improve the physics of male nudity.

Be careful what you ask for.

Feminina:

That’s…true…

Butch:

And maybe they feel they have to throw in some extra to make up for the fact that there’s been disproportionate female nudity.

This is on you.

Feminina:

It’s all my fault. I accept that.

But only if there’s actual nudity! Otherwise, I will deny responsibility.

It would be just like a game to be all “we have SO MANY Playboys and Vargas prints for the guys, let’s throw in something special for the ladies…I know, a guy named Jimmy Two Dicks!”

Butch:

It sure would be like THIS game.

Oh, and after Pagani, I want your take on Donovan’s take.

Also, have you got the FBI guy mentioning why it took him months to figure out Lincoln was involved?

Feminina:

Uh…maybe? Was that where he said he hadn’t realized Lincoln was still alive?

Butch:

After that. About Lincoln’s time in the army.

Feminina:

His records being classified? That’s the only thing I know about his thoughts on the subject.

Butch:

That was interesting. Do we have any idea why? I don’t.

Feminina:

I assumed it was special training in psychological warfare or something–we know he met Donovan while he was in the army, so I figured maybe he did secret missions with the CIA. But I think we don’t know for sure.

Yet.

Butch:

And another thing: he says “I’ve spent 47 years investigating Lincoln “ or something, which implies the case is open, right? You don’t keep investigating if the dude is arrested or dead.

Feminina:

Hm. Very true. And very interesting.

Maybe at the end of the game he goes undercover, walks off into the sunset, and we/the FBI never know what happened to him?

Although maybe he just meant “I’ve spent 47 years trying to figure out the precise timeline/money trail/etc. for this case,” which one could still do if Lincoln were dead, or imprisoned and not talking.

So killed a lot of Kevin, took out Merle the mid level boss Kevin (Someday a mid level boss Kevin will actually be named Kevin and what a wonderful day that will be), got some dudes to rat, LOST one of the dudes as he drove off, decided that “Drive like a madman” is ALSO a mechanic that needs to be in every game, called it a day.

Oh, found a playboy.

And destroyed heroin and learned how to wiretap (I should really get to jump into a haystack after I do that).

So…maybe themes. Maybe unintentional themes.

So Perla’s. Cassandra took Perla’s back, as she does. And it’s nice now, right? It even said that she turned it into a high class nightclub. I certainly thought it was nicer.

Now, what I can’t figure out is whether we busted up the prostitution racket (and made everything just jazz and good times) or we TOOK OVER the racket, in which case, where are the hookers?

Gentrified is a loaded word these days, as it is usually a euphemism for “white washed.” But here, the white dudes got kicked out and classy black dudes moved in. If we REALLY shut down the racket, that’s an interesting thematic twist. That’s really taking on the idea of what gentrification is, and what it should be. That nice and cultured and safe have nothing to do with race, and maybe the influx of DIVERSITY would better suit our cities. That would be some cool themeage.

But if he DIDN’T shut down the racket, and he and Cassandra are still running hookers out of Perla’s or out of the street or whatever, then it’s a different story. Then…what? The black guys are just better/more efficient at crime? That’s hardly a progressive ideal. That’s hardly an ideal of anything. Then I don’t know what I feel about all that.

Because it’s (probably intentionally) vague, but my impression is that they took over the racket, meaning it’s still operating but under their control. Meaning there’s still prostitutes back there in rooms behind the classy jazz stage, but, you know, they’re classy rooms now. And, obviously, classy prostitutes with nice clothes, rather than drugged up prisoners in tacky lingerie.

Which is…I don’t know. It’s an improvement to be sure, but prostitution is tricky. There are live, actual people involved in sex work who say it’s a totally fine, legitimate way to make a living, prostitution can be fine and dandy, they do it by choice because it’s more lucrative and no more physically or emotionally laborious than waiting tables all day, don’t feel bad about prostitutes, OK?

And I think we’re kind of meant to assume that the racket has gone from forcibly addicted women trapped in the business, to women exercising their agency, actively choosing to participate, and there on their own terms. (Interesting that we never see any of these women to actually tell us that, but still, that’s kind of what I think we’re supposed to be assuming.)

And, OK. That’s cool. I totally accept that sure, that’s a fine way to make a living if that’s what you pick, and absolutely it’s a step up for New Bordeaux’s working girls to have the business run by this classy black gang, as opposed to that seedy (and, obviously, horribly evil and abusive) white gang.

On the other hand…I think a lot of people would also say that prostitution was not actually a fine and dandy experience for them, even if they weren’t literally locked in a room and force-fed heroin to make them comply, and I wonder if maybe the reason we don’t actually hear from any women on the matter is because it risks running into a prickly issue on the intersection of race and sex.

Because the game doesn’t, I think, want to be in a position of implying that it’s bad for white guys to keep black women locked in a room purely to use them for sex, but that it’s OK for black guys to do the same thing. Hence, the black gang needs to be obviously much classier and cooler, to imply (without, again, actually saying so) that the position of those women we haven’t seen since Lincoln freed them has in fact improved.

Presumably, at least, they can now leave their rooms, and I won’t in any way minimize the hugeness of the difference between being a slave and being poor but free, which is a comparison you kind of have to draw. No argument, we/Lincoln helped those women, and (as far as we know) they are now free to make their own choices, and hopefully kick their drug habits and work through their trauma, because their lives obviously were awful.

But…I’ve read black women commenting on how black men in the movement in that time were often not exactly supportive of women’s rights, so maybe it was felt that addressing the issue directly in any way, even to have a woman show up and say “hey, I’m making lots more money and the rooms are so much nicer, life in the brothel could not be better now!” would cut a little too close to the implication that white guys using “our sisters” for sex is wrong, but it’s cool as long as it’s in the family.

Obviously, it’s entirely possible to be interested in racial equality and not gender equality, or vice versa, as we see throughout history in the fact that black women are pretty much the most consistently screwed group around. Sucks to be you, ladies! Back to the brothel, now!

I think it’s not at all a coincidence that Cassandra, our only real female character, is the one in charge of the prostitution racket. Honestly, the fact that there’s a prostitution racket may be why we have the character of Cassandra at all. It’s OK, a woman is running it!

Speaking of female characters, I thought it was interesting that the women Lincoln frees from the rooms while taking over the racket actually have names, which is rare for NPCs you meet in this kind of mission (although I can’t remember any of the names now). This made me think that maybe we WERE going to hear from them again (and who knows, perhaps at some point we still will, though I’m not holding my breath) and made it especially notable to me that we didn’t meet any parallel named character to tell us anything about the racket afterwards.

It made it a bit like “see, we care, these are real people being abused and you’re helping them!” when we got there, vs. “don’t worry, there aren’t any real people with opinions about their situation” once the racket is our responsibility.

Again, it’s just tricky. I mean, I have no problem in principle with the idea that you can have a classy brothel with a nice jazz club in front, and well-compensated women who freely chose the work from among a variety of options available to them and do it without shame or coercion. Whether or not it’s super believable that that’s the kind of establishment you’d have in the time and place of the game’s setting, I don’t know.

I’ll go with it, because it’s what I’d prefer to imagine, but it’s also true that sex worker rights were probably not top of the agenda for these characters in this situation, that black men as well as white men are capable of sexually abusing black women, that traditional morality often shuns and shames women engaged in this work, who may therefore not really have a lot of other options, and that it’s also just as plausible that the women we freed are still working in the club, maybe still hooked on heroin for all we know, and that in practical terms their daily lives are still largely the same. (Again, not to minimize the significance of being able to leave a room rather than being a prisoner there.)

Just one of those awkward things you deal with when you’re playing a game based on organized crime.

Butch:

Well….I read it that they took over the racket (cuz there’s “earn” or something….I don’t know how that works, exactly, but it seems a lot to earn from a jazz club), but I also looked around the club for a while, and didn’t see any prostitutes in the back rooms or anything. So…hmm.

Yeah, I see that argument for ‘vague suggestion that things improved’. It also would kinda hurt the whole “family” theme if they hadn’t. Generally, one does not prostitute one’s relatives. We’ve talked on the idea of race as a family here. We talked on freeing “our sisters.” Well, that sisterly bond kinda falls apart if you’re still making money off their sex work. Right?

Oh, dude, do we want to do the slave vs. poor but free thing? Maybe that’s for a different blog post. We’re touchy enough today.

That was rather interesting that Cassandra runs this. A cop out, perhaps, as well. A large cop out.

The women had names, and real stories. “She was going to college…” that sort of thing.

But…..

You know who didn’t have that? All the black women (why all women?) who were in bras and gas masks cutting up heroin last night. Lincoln went to destroy the heroin, but nothing at all was said about the, you know, 20 or so women cutting it. Why women? Was that established? That was….odd.

I’m going to be curious to see how the smack racket relates. Yes, I destroyed a bunch of heroin last night. Yay, me. But did I do that just to weaken a racket so I could take it over? Am I going to KEEP dealing heroin? Or…what? If I bust up the smack racket and clean up the hollow, did I do that with sex work, too? Hmm. Cuz if I wind up a drug pusher, that sorta undermines all the good work I did at Perla’s……

More of that tension with the crime thing. I mean, it’s like alcohol during prohibition. The trade is violent and destructive and illegal booze is wrecking the neighborhood, but…money!

Maybe we’re only going to sell drugs to the racist white gangs.

And, indeed, what was with those women in the bras cutting heroin? I was a little bemused by that as well. I figured maybe they’re in their underwear so they have fewer places to stash a bit of product, should they be inclined to try to steal? Or maybe it’s just really hot in there? Are hot rooms good for heroin processing?

I don’t know. It was odd because it didn’t seem particularly intended to be sexy (unlike most game scenes with women in underwear), so I was inclined to assume it was based on some actual fact related to the processing of heroin…which may be a generous assumption, but it was so odd, I wasn’t sure what to make of it otherwise.

Butch:

On that “only to racist whites….”

I noticed that all the customers in Perla’s (the MAYBE but probably brothel) were black. So….black hookers are fine if the johns are also black? It’s ok to sell heroin to racists?

There is some moral ambiguity here.

Here’s where we have to throw out something delicate:

The lead directors and writers of this game were white men. It’s always…interesting…when white dudes try to tell stories about race or gender from the perspective of minorities and women. Sometimes, very well meaning stories often misfire, or fail to accurately grasp the complexities of what they’re trying to do. It’s something we’ll have to keep an eye on.

On the smack house, I did hear Kevin banter where they were complaining about how hot it was in a warehouse, and some Kevin saying they can’t have fans because it would blow the drugs all around, which makes some practical sense. But why everyone was a black woman….you got me. And I agree: no way that was intended to be sexy. If it was it…wasn’t.

Which also gets me to thinking…..

The only real sexy stuff in this game so far is the playboys and Vargas stuff. With one exception (the first playboy you find), every single woman pictured has been white. Every one. So we have all these instances of (collectible) sexy white women, when the black women have been intentionally unsexy. Even the hookers in the brother were very much desexualized.

I wonder if they meant something by that, or….not.

Feminina:

It is always interesting to present (or, indeed, to talk about the presentation of) these issues when one is oneself not part of the relevant group. We can still try, I think we should try because ignoring things hardly ever makes them go away, but we have to know we might get it wrong and look clueless and/or like a huge jerk.

And/or like someone who knows nothing about heroin production. Which I am.

Interesting point about the sexy collectible white women, juxtaposed with the non-sexy presentation of the black women we meet. Because you’re right, we see a fair number of black women out and about in the world (I ran over one once–I am SO SORRY ma’am, it was an accident and I am a terrible person and I hope you’re OK), and they are all just walking around wearing normal clothes. And the women in their underwear were not sexy, they were just working. And Cassandra is always thoroughly clothed (even when she was pretending to be a sex slave, she was dressed), and the prostitutes you free are wearing enough clothes to cover them. All the nudity so far has been collectible images.

Maybe there’s something there about how ‘sexiness’ as a fantasy commodity (as opposed, perhaps, to ‘usefulness as a sex-tool’) is a white invention? Black women aren’t these airbrushed fantasies, they’re real people? I…don’t know.

But honestly, I wonder if trying to read anything into this other than “guys like nudity!” is kind of hopeless, just because if there’s anything there at all, you really have to wonder why Lincoln Clay collects these images.

Does he have a thing for white women? Or just for fantasy airbrushed women and he wishes they weren’t all so white but what are you going to do? Does he not even care (he certainly never comments about them), he just thinks they’ll be collector’s items later and fund future murder projects?

If there’s any thought behind the inclusion of the collectible nudity (beyond “guys like nudity!”), then it has to have considered this, and given that we have no explanation of any kind for why Lincoln cares…I kind of feel like there’s nothing deeper going on.

Though we’ll see, maybe they’ll do something more with it at some point. Like if the first black playmate shows up.

Butch:

Yup. We must know our own perspective. And, for that matter, the perspective of the lead developers. We’ve talked much about, say, David Cage being French, or CDPR being Polish, and how that might have affected the way they told the stories they told. I think it’s relevant to remember that this game, for all its diversity, was made by white men, and is being analyzed by a white man and a white woman (us).

Uh….I watched The Wire? Or was that cocaine?

On nudity: Not so. There were topless prostitutes in the brothel before you liberated (?) it. But they were in the backroom, wearing underwear even less appealing than burlap (which is very appealing when we’re selling it!), and were all very, well, normal looking. They looked like middle aged women who had led rough lives, not the hypersexualized, “perfect” women we usually see topless in games, or, for that matter, in playboy. Yes, there were boobs, but they looked like….well….normal boobs. Not Madison boobs or Triss boobs or playboy boobs.

As for the themes…Maybe? Perhaps? I have to ponder further.

Or it’s racist bias. I read this article a few weeks ago about a study that took all sorts of data, like hundreds of thousands of likes and messages and shit, from a big, national online dating site to see who got the most messages, attention, etc., to try to determine who society as a whole thought was desirable. (I liked this study as it said men’s attractiveness peaks at 50. I keep exercising, damn right.) Black MEN were way up near the top. At the very bottom? Black women.

So back to the lens and unconscious (or conscious) bias of the developers. These are American white men. Might this be a bit of unconscious racism in a game about the evils of racism?

(Side note: the one non white playmate I’ve found was Asian. Know who else was very desirable according to that survey? Asian women. So….unconscious bias at work?)

We’ll keep an eye. But I still say, there’s stuff that storytellers MEAN to say, and stuff that storytellers say without meaning to. We’ll keep an eye on all this.

Feminina:

Man, I’m telling you. Black women, no respect from anyone ever.

WERE there topless women in the brothel? Man, I am just not the audience for this nudity. I don’t even see it! I have this vague image in my head of all of them wearing some tacky lingerie. I must have put it on them in my imagination after the fact.

“Here, let me mentally help you into something you can wear so you don’t get arrested for public nudity while running out of this place once I start murdering everyone.”

But OK, that really only stresses the fact that, as you say, their nudity is presented as kind of incidental and not as something we’re meant to enjoy leering at–unlike the fantasy nudity of the collectibles. (Because that would be super gross.)

Butch:

That it would.

Remember, I’m on hypersensitivity mode because a kid might come out of bed at any moment. Need to know how fast I gotta call up the map. There’s ANYTHING on that screen, I got a finger on “options.”

Feminina:

It’s nice to have kids who sleep on a different floor. And even if they creep down, the screen is facing away from where they’d look into the living room, so I don’t have to be nearly as aware of objectionable potential on screen.